JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY.

XXII.

The full title of Mr. Motley’s next and last
work is “The Life and Death of John of Barneveld,
Advocate of Holland; with a View of the Primary Causes
and Movements of the Thirty Years’ War.”

In point of fact this work is a history rather than
a biography. It is an interlude, a pause between
the acts which were to fill out the complete plan
of the “Eighty Years’ Tragedy,” and
of which the last act, the Thirty Years’ War,
remains unwritten. The “Life of Barneveld”
was received as a fitting and worthy continuation
of the series of intellectual labor in which he was
engaged. I will quote but two general expressions
of approval from the two best known British critical
reviews. In connection with his previous works,
it forms, says “The London Quarterly,”
“a fine and continuous story, of which the writer
and the nation celebrated by him have equal reason
to be proud; a narrative which will remain a prominent
ornament of American genius, while it has permanently
enriched English literature on this as well as on the
other side of the Atlantic.”

“The Edinburgh Review” speaks no less
warmly: “We can hardly give too much appreciation
to that subtile alchemy of the brain which has enabled
him to produce out of dull, crabbed, and often illegible
state papers, the vivid, graphic, and sparkling narrative
which he has given to the world.”

In a literary point of view, M. Groen van Prinsterer,
whose elaborate work has been already referred to,
speaks of it as perhaps the most classical of Motley’s
productions, but it is upon this work that the force
of his own and other Dutch criticisms has been chiefly
expended.

The key to this biographical history or historical
biography may be found in a few sentences from its
opening chapter.

“There have been few men at any
period whose lives have been more closely identical
than his [Barneveld’s] with a national history.
There have been few great men in any history whose
names have become less familiar to the world, and
lived less in the mouths of posterity. Yet
there can be no doubt that if William the Silent was
the founder of the independence of the United Provinces,
Barneveld was the founder of the Commonwealth itself.
. . .

“Had that country of which he was
so long the first citizen maintained until our
own day the same proportional position among the
empires of Christendom as it held in the seventeenth
century, the name of John of Barneveld would have
perhaps been as familiar to all men as it is at
this moment to nearly every inhabitant of the Netherlands.